>>Well, if only a Visual FoxPro database was to be used, it would probably be. But it sounds a bit like an overhead to use XML when passing parameters to Oracle, doesn't it ?

>I though that we were discussing Visual FoxPro stored procedures.

Only VFP stored procedures were causing the problem, but we really intend to write a middle tier which could access VFP or Oracle in the same way.

>>Another question : Can I run into encoding/decoding problems due to the client and the server machines not having the same configuration / character set ?

>Can you be more specific?

I suppose it will be something we will have to test anyway. In the CURSORTOXML and XMLTOCURSOR functions, I can specify the type of encoding. So I very much hope that when encoding my parameter list to XML on the client and decoding it on the server, I will retrieve the original values, even if some character set configuration is different on the client and on the server.